“A warlord can be a Taliban, an al-Qaida, an opium trafficker or all of the above”

“Biden’s idea, as McChrystal put it bluntly, won’t work”

IBD: “Terrorists don’t wear badges and nobody calls the cops”

Biden Butts In

IBD: 6 Oct. 2009

Warfare: As the commander in Afghanistan tries to get President Obama’s attention on troops, it’s political players like Vice President Biden who have his ear. Yet the military has a record of success. Biden has only blunders.

By sending in 21,000 more troops and adding $44 billion to the war budget, the president erased doubts early in his term that the goal in Afghanistan was victory. Even more impressive, he appointed Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a successful Iraq War commander who excels in unconventional warfare, to lead the fight.

But the doubts have returned. McChrystal has merited just two encounters with Obama since taking over in June, and an Aug. 30 proposal seeking 40,000 more troops in a civilian-protection strategy has found the president unable to act. Amid the dithering, 10 U.S. soldiers were mowed down in Afghanistan over the weekend, precisely because they were outgunned and undermanned.

Obama’s reluctance to face the war and the commitment it requires has given an opening to Biden, who knows little about war but a lot about politics. Last week, Obama met with Biden and various Pentagon heavies in a long sit-down in which Biden recommended fighting only al-Qaida and not the Taliban.

This might be an acceptable strategy if the battlefield were some place like Copenhagen. But Afghanistan is a failed state where terrorists don’t wear badges (see above picture) and nobody calls the cops.

McChrystal’s long war experience has shown that protecting and defending civilians are critical to developing a state that can take on terrorists. In the fluid swamp of a failed state, loyalties can overlap. A warlord can be a Taliban, an al-Qaida member, an opium trafficker or all of the above. Biden’s idea, as McChrystal put it bluntly, “won’t work.”

His sentiment echoed comments made two weeks earlier by Gen.David Petraeus, the Central Command chief.

Both McChrystal and Petraeus have long records of military success. Biden, by contrast, has been wrong on every war he’s had a hand in.

He opposed the surge in Iraq, insisting instead on dividing Iraq into three warring fiefdoms with unequal distributions of oil.

He also opposed the Vietnam War, an opposition that led to defeat, a bloodbath of our Vietnamese friends and diminished U.S. global influence.

In addition, Biden played a role in the flawed 1999 design of Plan Colombia, which at first tried to separate a few of failed-state Colombia’s multiple enemies — in this case, drug dealers. But the strategy enabled FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, to grow strong in narcotrafficking as other players dropped off.

Iraq, Vietnam and Colombia all have implications for the war in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s record speaks for itself, while Biden has been wrong time and again. Yet it’s McChrystal who gets criticized for taking his recommendations public.

Obama must decide soon whether this is about winning at politics or at war. Biden’s easy way out represents the former, McChrystal’s reasoned recommendations the latter.

In the end, military victory will be the best politics of all.

Economics: “Everyone guessed wrong,” Vice President Joe Biden said Sunday, on the impact of stimulus legislation. Not exactly. In fact, there was no shortage of people who knew the stimulus wouldn’t work.

In his appearance on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” Biden was asked by host David Gregory to explain why job losses have continued even after the passage of economic stimulus legislation that was supposed to keep a lid on unemployment at 8%.

Biden tried to rationalize the sad state of affairs, in which the jobless rate is now 9.4%, but finally just said that, “Everyone guessed wrong at the time the estimate was made about what the state of the economy was at the moment this was passed.”

Anyone who guessed that Biden was wrong would have guessed right. On Feb. 18, we said: “The (stimulus) bill Congress hurried to pass late last week without anyone having read the entire 1,434 pages will in fact not stimulate much of anything.”

We further noted that the $787 billion package would not be an economic stimulus but a spending bill filled with “pork and outright waste.”

We were not alone. Some 330 economists signed a statement last winter saying that President Obama’s claim — that “there is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jump-start the economy” — simply “is not true.”

This statement, in an ad paid for by the Cato Institute, appeared on full pages in 24 major newspapers across the country, including the New York Times and Washington Post.

If the best the White House can do is guess as to how much unprecedented federal spending can affect the economy, then voters made a poor guess themselves last fall when they gave it their vote. Maybe from this we’ll all learn that guessing has no place in the voting booth or the crafting of policy.

The Republic Of Hezbollah

Middle East: The job of a vice president was once to attend foreign funerals. Joe Biden was in Beirut on Friday to show support in advance of an election that may see the death of a Western democracy.

While we’ve been fighting for democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab world’s oldest and most dynamic multicultural democracy, Lebanon, has been dying a slow and painful death. A neighbor to Israel, the Switzerland of the Middle East has been sucked into a conflict it would have preferred to have avoided.

It’s been fought over by Israel and the PLO, then Israel and Hezbollah, which has used Lebanon and its people as a human shield behind which to pursue the dream of Hezbollah’s Iranian and Syrian masters to destroy Israel.

We have chronicled the tribulations of this proud country known to most Americans only as the ancestral home of entertainer Danny Thomas. But it was always more than that. We wanted to bring democracy and tolerance to the Middle East. In Lebanon it was already there.

In 2006, the Syrian- and Iranian-backed terror group Hezbollah, heavily armed and financed by Damascus and Tehran, provoked a war with Israel using Lebanon and its people as a human shield.

Despite U.N. Resolution 1559, which demanded all militia groups disarm, Hezbollah kept its weapons and rearmed while it began a two-year campaign marked by additional violence and assassinations to destabilize the government of Lebanon.

Hailed as a defender rather than a usurper of Lebanese democracy, Hezbollah (the Party of Allah) forcibly gained its long-sought veto power over government decisions in a new cabinet of national unity.But Hezbollah wants more and, in the upcoming June 7 parliamentary elections, may win it all.

The Shiite group that held but 14 seats in Lebanon’s 128-seat parliament “negotiated” this power at the end of a gun after it displayed force a year ago when its gunmen overran Beirut neighborhoods and laid siege to government buildings.

Hezbollah was responsible for the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 Americans in April 1983 before 9/11 became the No. 1 terrorist killer of Americans in the world. Hezbollah was also responsible for the 1985 hijacking of a TWA flight in which American serviceman Robert Stethem was brutally beaten, killed and dumped on the tarmac. Hezbollah kidnapped and murdered U.S. Army Col. William Higgins and the CIA’s William Buckley.

The political system in Lebanon had been delicately balanced between Shiites, Sunnis, Druze and Maronite Christians since it gained independence from France in 1943, forming what is known as “the first republic.” In the aftermath of a crippling civil war, an accord was reached in 1989 forming “the second republic.” Under this agreement, the president would always be a Christian, the prime minister a Sunni and the speaker of parliament a Shiite.

Hezbollah and its allies are campaigning under the slogan “The Third Republic.” Hezbollah wants it all — an Islamic republic on the Mediterranean facing Israel and the West and backed by an Iran with nuclear weapons. That could be a game-changer in the Mideast.

Amin Gemayel, a Maronite and former Lebanese president, was quoted by the An-Nahar daily on May 19 as saying this “third republic” would in fact be “a republic of Hezbollah, its cadres, and what they will bring to their country — a republic of Hezbollah’s weapons.”

The White House said Biden’s visit, in advance of Lebanon’s June 7 parliamentary elections and during which he met with President Michel Suleiman, was “to reinforce the United States’ support for an independent Lebanon.” During a visit to Beirut last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sidestepped reporters’ questions about Hezbollah and Iran, but did say the U.S. would “continue to support the voices of moderation.”

But all this may be too little too late, and those voices of moderation may soon be silenced. We have spent too much time tip-toeing around Iran and its true intentions in the Middle East. On June 7, we may pay for our disinterest in Lebanon.

** AND Lets all pray that some one in our government will be intelligent enough to realize that we must stop Iran from having weapons that will take out Israel. We can’t let that happen.**

Don

Vice President Joe Biden last week as he arrived at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base.

Vice President Joe Biden tells CNN that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be ‘ill advised’ to try to strike Iranian nuclear facilities.

Reporting from Washington — Vice President Joe Biden issued a high-level admonishment to Israel’s new government Tuesday that it would be “ill advised” to launch a military strike against Iran.

Biden said in a CNN interview that he does not believe newly installed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would take such a step. Even so, his comment underscored a gap between the conservative new Israeli government and the Obama White House on a series of questions, including the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and Iran.

While the Obama administration has made a series of recent overtures to Tehran, the Israelis have grown more confrontational out of concern that the Islamic Republic’s increasing nuclear know-how could one day become an existential threat.

Netanyahu signaled several times during his election campaign that he would not tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran. “I promise that if I am elected, Iran will not acquire nuclear arms,” he said in one appearance, “and this implies everything necessary to carry this out.”

With his brief comment Tuesday, Biden became the highest-ranking administration official to caution the Jewish state against a military strike. In the interview, Biden was asked whether he was concerned that Netanyahu might strike Iranian nuclear facilities.

“I don’t believe Prime Minister Netanyahu would do that. I think he would be ill advised to do that,” Biden said.

“And so my level of concern is no different than it was a year ago.”

But many U.S. officials believe Israel is serious. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. forces in the Middle East, told senators this month that the Israeli government may be “so threatened by the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon that it would take preemptive military action to derail or delay it.”

Other U.S. officials have made it clear in the past that they would prefer that Israel not carry out a strike against Iran. Navy Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cautioned last summer against military action.
“This is a very unstable part of the world,” he said then. “And I don’t need it to be more unstable.” [“I”??]

Among other concerns, U.S. Defense Department officials worry that Iran might retaliate by striking at U.S. troops in neighboring Iraq. [Let’s pray that the “US Defense Department” is prepared to protect our troops in Iraq – NOT a smart response. D.]

Differences between U.S. and Israeli officials also are emerging on key issues involving the Palestinians. Netanyahu has not embraced Washington’s goal of an independent Palestinian state, and some of his key supporters favor expanded Jewish settlements in the West Bank, an idea criticized by President Obama.
But U.S. views are important to the Israelis. Steven J. Rosen, a former policy director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, an influential lobbying group, said a decision by Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities “depends to a large extent on the impact such a strike might have on the United States.”He made the comment in a blog, the Obama Mideast Monitor.Many top officials in the Obama administration have said they believe the costs of a U.S. attack on Iran would outweigh any benefits, and they are considered less likely to favor military action than the Bush administration.
One hint of the Obama administration’s intentions may lie in its choice of top experts.
Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, has hired longtime Iran expert Vali Nasr. Dennis Ross, senior administration advisor for Southwest Asia, has hired Ray Takeyh, another veteran Iran expert.
Both Nasr and Takeyh have advocated diplomatic engagement with Tehran.paul.richter@latimes.com

Campaign ’08: Like many others, we took it as another gaffe when Joe Biden said he expected Barack Obama to be “tested” shortly after taking office.

But when he repeated it, we wondered: What’s he trying to tell us?

Glib, voluble and unscripted, Sen. Biden is liable to say anything on a given day. That’s why it pays to listen carefully to what he repeats –because it’s obviously something he’s thought about.“Mark my words,”Biden said in San Francisco last Saturday. “With the next, first six months of this administration, if we win, they’re going to – we’re going to face a major international challenge.Because they’re going to want to test him, just like they did young John Kennedy. They’re going to want to test him.”

Then, the very next day in Seattle, he said: “Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy . . . Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the metttle of this guy.”

£And just what would a “generated crisis” be? Could it be as former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton said Wednesday – that “leaders around the world see Obama as soft, untested and weak, and they will react accordingly?”

If so, Biden is right: Some aspiring latter-day Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro or Ho Chi Minh will no doubt test our new commander in chief.

But there’s another angle to this, based on what Biden the senator knows – that Obama’s defense policies, once it’s obvious how they’ll undermine us, are likely to be very, very unpopular. In this case, Biden may be calling on his party’s hard, pacifist core – Moveon.org, Code Pink and the like – to stand by their man.

He’ll need their support.

Like Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, Obama’s policies often sound good on the surface, but will in fact materially weaken America’s ability to defend herself. That’s not just our opinion, mind you; it’s straight from the horse’s mouth. [Watch Video]

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I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending,” Obama told the pacifist Caucus for Priorities last year. “I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems.”

Pretty sweeping. That means no more missile defense – although in recent tests in the Pacific and elsewhere, the system has shown itself to be

a formidable potential shield against enemy attack.

But it didn’t end there.“I will not develop nuclear weapons,” he also promised Caucus for Priorities, vowing to seek “deep cuts” in our own arsenal, unilaterally disabling our nuclear deterrent as Russia and China engage in massive military buildups.

On the diplomatic front, Obama has pledged to talk to the likes of Iran’s Ahmadinejad and Venezuela’s Chavez “without preconditions.” But who knows what he’ll give up once he sits down to talk?

Obama has vowed to pull out of Iraq soon after taking office – undercutting the hard-won victory now shaping up there, as the U.S. prepares a careful, phased withdrawal of U.S. forces by 2012.

Such policies will create a vacuum that our foes will be only too happy to exploit.

In response to seeing a weakling in the White House, will Russia do something rash in Eastern Europe, like invade Ukraine? Will South Korea develop a bomb, knowing the U.S. won’t stop it? Will Iran attack Israel, as it has promised, thinking America has become a paper tiger? We don’t know, but maybe Joe Biden does.